Admittedly it does sound counterintuitive for a fly fisherman to proclaim a love for rowing.
Without a doubt it’s nigh on impossible to beat the intimacy of wading a small stream (far Upper Gallatin, Firehole or even the Upper Gibbon, I’m thinking of you…) or a coastal tidal flat at sunrise with tails popping all around.
But there’s something just as connecting, maybe even more so pending the day and one’s mood, about being on the sticks and dancing your watercraft down the living river.
Watch any truly gifted oarsman on the sticks and you’ll walk away at the end of the day mistakenly assuming they have the easiest job in the world. Like most situations in life where one makes that assumption, you couldn’t be more wrong.
My clan has had the pleasure of watching some of the masters at work over the years, often from afar, guys like Joe Moore, Joe Willauer, Mark Raisler and my rowing mentor, Lincoln Clark. There are literally thousands of folks around the country, perhaps dominantly in the West, who pilot drifters and rafts with unmatched efficiency and skill.
The ace oarsman does more with less effort; his (or her) boat glides and dances across the water, through the riffles and drops, smoothly pausing here and there to give their fisher(s) another shot or another 5 or 6 seconds on the drift.
The big boys manage current flows, changing wind directions and speeds, river obstacles, other boats and waders all the while keeping an eye on widely variant fishers’ skills and abilities to glide into optimal position all day long. And they do it quietly with a minimum of strokes on the sticks.
Sounds easy. It ain’t.
I still think my sweetest rowing boat was the first Tatman drifter I built back in 1989 (a 17 and 1/2 foot, wide bottomed, high sided boat to keep toddlers from toppling out named the Jess Bess). It was astounding light (painted exterior and oiled interior kept the weight down), hard-chined as his boats are and drew about 3 inches with two guys aboard. The high sides made it a bitch in the wind on the Missouri or Yellowstone though we never dunked a kid in several thousand river miles.
Like all novice rowers I probably took more strokes on the sticks during that boat’s inaugural float on the Snake (5 hours and about ten miles) than I did the entire next season.
But finally figuring out how to scoot through more challenging river obstacles with just a few easy strokes on the oars – like the old Maze obstruction on the Snake River’s Dead Man’s Bar to Moose float or the Green’s Mother-in-Law rapid at low flows (so named because it’s a bitch) – still bring a smile and a sense of damned genuine accomplishment.
As much as I despise the selfie movement, the pic below has been framed and hanging in whatever office I’ve had for 25 years now. That’s a 1989, crappy non-digital snap (busted Hodgman waders even) of that first boat just having rolled under the Untouchables Bridge on the Mo’ on a rainy and cold October late morning. The soft-chined, low sided glass boats, like the nifty Adipose rigs, are probably a much sweeter row and ride these days, but damn, I miss that boat (sold for our first cataraft….).
I love to fly fish, but dammit, I love to row.
